Frischseminar: Maria Laura Di Tommaso

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of school closures in the spring of 2020 on literacy and mathematics skills of high school students in Italy, which was the first Western country hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, responding with a strict lockdown and total school closures through the end of the school year. Using longitudinal data of National Standardised tests, we analyse the learning outcomes of two adjacent cohorts of students, the pre-Covid and the Covid cohort, controlling for previous learning outcomes. The pandemic had a large mean negative impact on students’ performance in mathematics and in literacy (-0.39 standard deviations in mathematics and -0.41 in Italian). We also analyse the different impacts of the pandemic on different high schools’ tracks.  Learning losses are greater for boys than for girls and for students in the North compared to students in the South.  There are no differences in learning losses for students with highly educated parents compared to students with low educated parents.